"It's not that MS Excel is a soft skill, it's that people's MS Excel skills are soft. Excel is called Excel for a reason..."

-Steven Bugge

The benefit of being a member of this meetup group is improving one’s knowledge of MS Excel and learning how it can be leveraged at both work and home.

The Excel Refresher Meetup is here for beginning, intermediate and advanced users of Excel who would like to learn and share tips and tricks with fellow users. Maybe you are upgrading to Excel 2007 2010 2013, switching from PC to Mac or maybe your new to Excel all together. This is a great place to help get acquainted. Excel is an extremely dynamic and useful program and there are TONS of resources out there on the web for MS Excel, but sometimes it’s hard to see the forest through the trees. Simply having someone to talk to can make all the difference and that is the purpose of this meet up.

I was told once told by a manager that "MS Excel is a soft skill". Those words did not sit well with me as I tried to digest that statement while thinking back to how it was my MS Excel skills that got me hired in the first place; at every company I had ever worked for...

This dichotomy eventually lead me to make the decision of working for myself as a data consultant, because what I came to realize was; it’s not that MS Excel is a soft skill, it's that people's MS Excel skills are soft.

Excel is misunderstood and therefore underutilized by many professionals. CEO’s, entrepreneurs, med students, manufacturing analysts and venture capitalists (to name a few) have all reached out to me with Excel questions and are simply blown away by what they didn’t know they didn’t know. I believe that an informed community is a productive one. When the US produces 60,000 engineers a year, and India and China produce 400,000 and 1.6 million respectively, we as a nation have a lot of catching up to do (no pressure!).

We have to begin somewhere, of course, and I think a communal collaboration of MS Excel knowledge amongst CEO’s, secretaries, professors, students, working and stay at home parents, along with everyone in between, is a damn good place to start! (# S.T.E.M.)